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February 21, 2013

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012)

Hugh Grant, Salma Hayek, Jeremy Piven

I am determined to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies as possible before the big day. That explains why I watched this. It doesn't, however, explain why this movie was nominated in the first place. It was done by the same people who created Wallace and Gromit, the funky looking British claymation guy with his dog. Perhaps that set me up for disappointment - I love Wallace and Gromit. I did not love this movie.

It's not terrible, of course. Animated movies for kids rarely are. But the plot is predictable, the jokes are thin, and frankly, it's sometimes hard to understand the words through the fast talking English accents (sorry Hugh, but not every actor was meant to voice an animated character). And it has all the classic trappings of a kid's movie - bright colors, crazy-looking characters, an underdog you root for, some animals, and of course, some kind of moral lesson at the end (damn you, Aesop, for starting that trend). So who knows, maybe I expected a higher sum considering its parts.

The positive? Well, it was better than Frankenweenie. And the monkey is pretty funny.

Final word: The best part of the movie was reading the names of the characters during the closing credits.